To my brother:

I recommend good websites more often than good books. I particularly like those websites that well reflect the knowledge and personality of a single individual. By reading those websites, I can learn much from great minds and great people.

Philip Greenspun’s presence at philip.greenspun.com is one of those great websites. (more…)

Paul Graham recently gave a keynote speech on Oscon 2005 (O’Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005 - Portland, Oregon). I listened to his talk via IT Conversations. Here is the link: Paul Graham - An OSCON 2005 Keynote.

Graham pointed out and discussed the three big lessons that business can learn from open source and blogging.
(1) People work harder on stuff they like.
(2) The standard office environment is very unproductive.
(3) Bottom-up often works better than top-down.

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My 4-years-old son loves to play Little Fighter 2 very much. One day when I searched the Web about how to set up the game so that it can connect to my another computer at home, I came to this page and learnt that the creators of this great and free game are two Hong Kong young guys.

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Paul Graham wrote an essay about what great hackers have in common. Here are some quotes.

Their defining quality is probably that they really love to program. Ordinary programmers write code to pay the bills. Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun, and which they’re delighted to find people will pay them for.

What do hackers want? Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools. In fact, that’s an understatement. Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. They’ll simply refuse to work on projects with the wrong infrastructure.

Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software. Not just because it’s better, but because it gives them more control.

Along with good tools, hackers want interesting projects.

Along with interesting problems, what good hackers like is other good hackers.

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In my previous post, I put down a number of my favorite weblogs about learning, technology and education. I continue to add more in the following.

Stephen’s Web by Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes is a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata as well as the emerging fields of weblogs in education and content syndication. He is perhaps best known for his daily research newsletter, OLDaily (short for Online Learning Daily), which reaches thousands of readers across Canada and around the world.

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